


The Stone Garden

by smokesprite



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Mary is a witch, Neil is freaking out, Starts slow bc everyone is a statue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-11 01:14:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8947366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smokesprite/pseuds/smokesprite
Summary: "Until the day they beat him up, Neil had liked the statue of the twins the best."For as long as he can remember, Neil has known no other purpose than to mind his mother's stone statues. When his mother dies, insidious changes come over her garden, and Neil begins to see this paradise as the prison it truly is.





	1. The Garden

Until the day they beat him up, Neil had liked the statue of the twins the best.

The two men stood facing each other, looking down into an oblong bowl cradled between them. Neil thought they looked lonely, but perhaps he was projecting. Their fingers lingered within inches of each other but never touched. Sometimes, Neil sat before them and imagined their hands finally coming together.

He knew they were only stone, but it was something in their expressions.

He’d explained this to his mother one day and she’d told him that he was not allowed to have favorites. Neil knew better than to argue with his mother about her statues, but that didn’t stop him from favoring the twins in secret.

At least she wasn’t a hypocrite. Mary treated the statues like real people, and she didn’t favor any of them—not even Neil.

In the mornings, while Neil ate breakfast, his mother would read to the petit girl who knelt next to the gate. Neil would parody her pose and look up at the fence. It stretched miles above them all, sleek iron poles disappearing into clouds. He would stare until he saw double and his eyes watered. Then, he would look down into the patch of daisies at her knees, rolling his head and working out the kinks in his neck. Mother always instructed him to give the girl a kiss when she finished reading. Her cheek was cold against his lips.

Neil hated playing for the dancing couple, but still he mastered instrument after instrument. In between lessons, Mary would tend to the food—tomatoes and squash and whatever else she could coax out of the earth.

After weeks of the same unbearable song he convinced her to teach him the dance the couple was trapped in. They spun circles around the couple and it was the only time Neil had seen his mother laugh. The next day, she lugged out an oversized harp and he resigned himself to the slow process of wearing her down until she gave him another dance lesson.

There were three statues surrounding the well. One girl sat propped against it, and Neil had always thought she was rather…empty. The fighting boys were much more interesting. Neil couldn’t tell who’d won until one suddenly had no head. Mary had wept over the pieces, but smacked Neil when he’d tried to put them back together.

“He’s ruined now,” she’d said, and they’d spent the day burying stray stone shards.

Neil felt watched sometimes, but that day it’d bothered him more than ever.

There was a boy on the only bench—he didn’t look lonely, just…waiting. Neil stargazed with him on clear nights instead of curling against his mother in their small shed with their small cot. Inevitably, she would emerge to join them, and he would drift to sleep listening to his mother detail the constellations.

Then his mother died. She’d gripped her midsection, stumbled, and then there was nothing left of her. He’d panicked. He’d mourned. He’d buried her body.

Things changed.

He grew taller, something that had not happened in…well, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gained an inch. The nights passed and he regained a sense of time. Like time was a dream he’d had long ago and he was just now remembering it.

As he grew older it began to strike him just how young the statues were, all but the man in the back corner. He was middle aged, his expression pained, and mother had chained him to the fence. Neil avoided that one at all costs.

The weather changed, eternal spring heating to summer. He’d forgotten the seasons, and was glad to see them return until the statues grew ill. It started in the dancing couple’s fingers, a cracking. Neil panicked—not his mother’s statues. It was a slow and torturous thing to watch.

When he sensed snow coming he went to sit near the kneeling girl, debating whether to get her a blanket. The hanging ivy had died, leaving the poles bare and easy to see through. There was nothing but foggy whiteness; no hints to be deciphered, no answers to be found. Defeated, he leaned forward to kiss her cheek and paused. Cracking around her lips had begun to reveal something underneath. He ran his fingers over her mouth. There was something of a rose color. If he was being honest, he may have even felt a breath.

Spring returned and rain began to fall. He’d never experienced anything more than a slight shower and banging, booming thunder started him out of his sleep. He thought the fences were falling down around him, that the sky was rejecting them. Eventually Neil convinced himself to go outside and he remembered what real storms were. The rain fell heavy on his upturned face as he wandered through the garden, wondering at the way the rain splashing off stone looked like an aura.

He turned just in time to see the lightning strike. The girl leaning against the well shattered into a thousand pieces. Neil screamed.

His mother’s paradise was coming apart, and it scared him.

One day, edgy and needing some semblance of peace, he joined the twins in their contemplation of the birdbath—now always filled, the rain would allow nothing else. He searched for where that word had come from; there had never been birds in the garden.

He stood with one hand over each of theirs, mirroring their positions.

Neil lost himself in the water, his mind going numb. Ripples formed in the slight breeze. He did not know how long it took for his eyes to refocus. He noticed his gaze stuck on something, and realized he was making eye contact with one of the statues.

Neil jerked his head up. The twin was looking down, as always. But a moment later, quicker than Neil knew how to process, the eyes flickered. One minute they were downcast, and the next they were staring into his soul.

Neil fell back.

He fashioned a lock for the shed door. He rarely left the shed, save to visit the kneeling girl. She calmed him so long as he didn’t look at her face.

He wondered if his mother’s garden was turning against him. It made sense; he could never be as good to them as Mary had been. He was running out of food, had barely had the sense to ration through the winter, and now the garden remained troublingly bare.

It stormed every night. He had always had trouble sleeping, but now it was impossible.

It was summer when he heard the smash. He battled fear and the instinct to hide, and ran out the door just in time to see one twin tear the bowl out of the hands of the other and hurl it. Neil didn’t think the twin had been aiming, but it got him in the gut and he fell, gasping.

Neil’s vision was dimming, but he could see the statue walking over. One leg was still stone, the knee unbendable, so he hobbled. He looked deranged and Neil couldn’t believe he’d ever conjured a sense of sympathetic pity for this creature.

Was he going to die? Was this how it ended?

The twin reached down, and Neil would’ve whimpered through his wheezing if he could. However, the twin reached for the bowl. He threw it against the shed and the bowl shattered. Only then did he look at Neil.

Reaching down, he grabbed the front of Neil’s shirt.

“Where the hell am I?”


	2. The Statues

The dream was back, the one with the ravens. There were so many wings beating against each other that it looked like a hurricane of feathers. Neil had always thought that if his mother’s garden wasn’t nestled in a bank of clouds, then it was carried above the rest of the world on the wings of those ravens.

It wasn’t obvious to him when he woke up. The sky was clear, but the constellations were so faded as to be nearly unrecognizable. Beyond the fence, it was foggy, a wall of grey. It could well have been a dream, but an ache went through Neil’s wrist when he shifted, and he decided he must be awake.

Waking thoughts were for statues, not ravens, and he switched accordingly.

After two days of watching life and color bleed into his mother’s statues, two days of the monster twin’s questions and threats, Neil had been forced to accept that this wasn’t a dream, or a nightmare, or a hallucination.

The monster twin hadn’t touched Neil since the day he’d put Neil in the old man’s chains. Instead, he tested Neil with soul-rending staring matches. It made Neil wonder: if he hadn’t spent his whole life avoiding his mother’s ire, never challenging her, would he have been better at this?

Or, maybe he was good at this. The monster twin hadn’t broken him yet.

As for what the monster twin wanted...answers. Answers, when Neil had none. He remained silent, unwilling to demystify his uselessness, anticipating the moment he would be done away with.

Neil thought he had accepted death, but there was a new rush of fear when the girl propped against the fence came to life. She was a whirlwind, roving around the garden, shaking the other statues, smacking them.

Neil couldn’t help but compare her to the monster twin. Both resorted to violence within minutes of waking up. When she punched the unshattered fighting boy, Neil knew it had to have hurt her hand. She wasn’t likely to do it again, but she had already provoked the monster.

The view from this spot was surprisingly clear. Neil would have thought, what with the chains, his mother would have tried to put the old man somewhere with less perspective. The action served as a catalyst, a call, and one by one the statues awoke. The kneeling girl, unbalanced, trampled all the daisies before standing straight. There was more noise than Neil could ever remember hearing, with the exception of the thunderstorm. The same statues tried to get at each other, while the others held certain parties back. It didn’t work; it was chaos.

Neil had begun to wonder if they’d all brawl each other to death when the dancing couple came to and attempted to establish order.

It was strange to see their face with different expressions—it was strange to see them all moving. And more, it was terrifying when they, one by one, turned their attention to Neil.

It was the first fighting girl who came forward. Her hair was a light blonde, and it hung in tangled clumps. Up close, he could see that spots of make up clung to her face, having somehow formed from the stone. She grabbed his throat and pushed him against cold iron.

“Where is Seth,” she demanded.

Neil did not know who Seth was.

She ground her fingers into his neck and he choked. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he realized this was the first time he'd been touched by someone other than his mother. Her hands were warm. He didn't like it. 

The kneeling girl came forward, stray daisy petals clinging to her knees and a kind look on her face. She set her hand on the blonde’s shoulder. “Allison.”

Nothing in Allison’s grip changed, but her face did. It broke into a million pieces, shattered, like…oh.

“There were two,” Neil rasped. “A boy and a girl by the well.”

“What happened to him.” Her voice was almost a growl.

“He…he broke.”

“He _broke_?” Would she kill him?

“I woke up one morning, and…” Neil couldn’t shrug, but he nodded his head at the land behind her. He should have remained silent. He’d kept his tongue so well with the monster, but the hysteria in her eyes... “We buried him over there.”

She stared blankly at him for a moment, then keened. The grief was as raw and fresh as what Neil felt for his mother. Her hand went limp, but by then it was something else blocking his breath. He could not mourn here, not now.

The girl comforting Allison drew her away, and Neil found he couldn’t look any of the others in the eye. Seeing them sickly was bad; seeing them alive was worse. His mother had always insisted on loving the statues, on taking care of them, but…he had never thought of them as people.

Neil and the monster twin watched as the statues—people, now—shook at the bars and tried to find a way out. It was in vain. They attempted to climb on each other’s shoulders and find the top, but two of the girls were incapacitated by heartache, and the rest couldn’t figure out how to work as a team.

Despite the anxiety that being trapped with them caused him, Neil was glad they didn’t know more about the garden than he did. He had not been able to pry his mother’s secrets from her in life, and he did not want them handed over by his captors now that she was gone. No, Neil would drag his mother’s secrets out of the grave, with relish.

Eventually, the dancing girl approached him and eyed him suspiciously. She had strong features, and as she spoke, he realized why she was the one the others listened to. “I’m Dan. Andrew says you haven’t been talkative.”

Neil had nothing to say.

“You can keep your secrets. Whatever they are, I don’t care, I just want to get out.” She put her hands on her hips. She tried, she really did, but the more she wheedled the more Neil was determined to sink back into his silence. That is, until she asked, “Don’t you want to leave?”

What a question.

Neil considered his next move. He had a working theory about the garden, and if he was right then they wouldn’t need him to get out. How much the monster twin suspected, Neil didn’t know, but it might be worth talking. Just a little, to keep them from throwing him away. Andrew’s eyes were locked on him, his face shadowed in the pre-dawn glow of the sky.

Neil opened his mouth, “How much do you remember?”

Her eyes were searching; they wouldn’t find anything. He could see a part of her wanted to remind him that _she_ was the one asking questions, but the part of her that needed him to keep talking forced her to answer, “Not much. I remember you. I remember a storm. Should I remember more?”

She didn’t remember his mother.

“What about before the garden?” Neil tried.

Her face clouded over. “You keep your privacy, and I get to keep mine.”

“I meant, what is the last thing you remember?” The others had gathered to watch curiously. There was a tension to the group. Not violent, not yet, but it wouldn’t take much for everything to erupt a second time. He would be the target; he couldn’t let that happen.

Dan shook her head, oblivious to his racing thoughts, lost in her own. Her brow furrowed. Abruptly, she returned to the rest of the group. They crowded, shortly devolving into arguments. He felt their tension turn into something else—a panic.

The stargazer broke off from the group. Dark skin and hair contrasted with the pale blue of his shirt, but his eyes were the brightest thing about him. He grabbed Neil by the front of his shirt. “Give us our memories back!” He demanded.

Dan stepped forward. “Nicky!”

“One more thing,” Andrew called. He sounded bored. “There’s an old man dying in the shed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here it is. I'm not exactly happy with it, but I think it would have been awkward no matter what I did. The next chapter is shaping up nicely, though--everything comes together!


	3. The Outside

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This song is what I listened to on repeat while writing this, so for those of you who like reading to music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1j2LoW3P14 ("All the King's Horses" by Karmina)

They couldn’t kill him.

They could beat him, but they quickly learned what Andrew had: Neil didn’t talk unless he had something to say.

When he wasn’t being interrogated, he was forced to watch Allison’s recovery over Seth’s grave. That was worse in some ways. It made him think too much of his mother.

He knew where Mary was buried, but no one else knew she’d even existed. He expected flowers to bloom over her grave, or a fruit tree, but nothing happened. If anything, the grass over her body was duller than the other patches.

Then, nothing was vibrant in the garden these days. Nothing but the yelling.

“I made some playing cards.” Nicky said, the first sign the group was switching tactics. Nicky made himself comfortable several safe feet from Neil. Neil thought the distance was pointless, as he was only ever unchained for bathroom breaks. His shoulders felt 90 years older than the rest of his body. “You can’t move, but I can play for you.”

“It doesn’t matter that I don’t know any games?” Neil asked.

Nicky snorted disbelievingly. “You don’t know any games?”

Neil didn’t know any games.

“Oh,” Nicky blinked. “So you really…have you always been…alone?”

Neil shrugged.

Nicky hesitated, chewing his lip. “I remember playing with Erik. I think he’s my lover—or, he was. Who knows if he’s still… Listen, we have lives out there. Can’t you just…let us go?”

No. Neil couldn’t.

And talking to him instead of hitting him wouldn’t give him any more of a reason to talk.

If Nicky took measures to put Neil at ease, Kevin did the opposite. Kevin was the fighting boy who hadn’t been shattered. He just sat, staring at Neil, and when he did speak there was no pretense of friendship.

“I don’t know how I know you, but I do. None of the others get it,” Kevin shook his head. “It feels like...before.”

Neil knew what ‘before’ felt like, because Neil was beginning to remember a father. A father that was cruel—a father the color of red, like blood and fire. He thought his mother might’ve been afraid; perhaps the garden was a hiding place.

He considered giving Kevin a different name than the one Neil’s mother had used in the garden, but Neil wasn’t sure if the name in his head was his, or his father’s, and something about that connection bothered him.

Regardless of mothers and fathers and names, Neil still had no word for what Kevin was to him.

They sat in pensive silence.

Andrew was hiding as many secrets as Neil was, Neil was sure of it. He made it a game to try and puzzle them out, and the night before everything changed, Neil finally lost.

“The others tell me their memories to guilt me. What do you have to offer?”

“I have nothing to offer.” Andrew looked like the sort of man who would be empty regardless of imprisonment in a magical garden. It was Andrew’s turn, “When you told Allison where Seth was buried, you said ‘we’.”

“‘We’?”

“You weren’t alone.”

“You wouldn’t know.”

“And you won’t tell me.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t care.”

" _We_ could have known each other,” Neil said it teasingly, knowingly, but something in Andrew’s expression sharpened.

“No,” Andrew’s lips twisted around the word, almost a smile.

That night it stormed, and Neil’s anxieties about Andrew were replaced. He had long since grown to associate storms with disaster, and this storm proved no different.

Neil didn’t know how long it was before he saw the first skeleton, but after he had, he couldn’t stop. They were everywhere. Bones, bones, more bones. Bones in the harsh lightning and bones lurking in the shapes of shadows. The longer he looked, the more they looked back.

Neil couldn’t stop thinking that he was supposed to have done something; that he should have somehow taken control of the garden after his mother died. It felt like they were falling out of the sky. Perhaps they weren’t drifting as it had always appeared, but instead hurtling downwards at the speed of light. Maybe they would die and be trapped in the sky forever as ghosts. Was all of this is fault? Could he avert disaster if he found a key memory in time?

By morning, he was delirious.

The few times he regained consciousness he managed to piece together that he was no longer chained to a fence. The realization paled in comparison to his dreams of the ravens--dreams now haunted by vengeful skeletons. The wings of the ravens kept decaying away, and cold winds carried loose feathers and the stench of carrion.

Neil grew convinced that they were all dead--everyone in the garden. They’d been living some sort of half life and now it was time they get their due. Bony fingers poked into his neck, checking for a pulse. If they found it, they’d strangle him, he had to fight. He thought he did; he couldn’t remember.

When his fever finally broke, Dan was leaning over him.

“You have to fix him!”

Neil blinked. The four of them—Andrew and Dan standing, the old man on the cot, and Neil on the floor—could barely fit in the old shed. When he got a good look at the old man, he saw that he was so grey, he might as well have been stone, and his breaths came in labored gasps.

Neil adjusted to reality. They weren’t dead. They weren’t dead, but someone was dying.

Dan explained, “His organs keep failing. He almost died once, Aaron barely managed to keep his heart beating. The problem is clearly magical, and he needs help _now_.”

Neil wished she’d shut up.

Thoughts began to move through Neil’s head. They started slow, like honey, but Neil was quick to realize more of the fog had lifted.

Neil had been young, but a memory of sitting by Mary in a library tugged at him...fragments of theory and witchcraft that he still didn’t understand... the garden had been tied to her life force. No, her life force had _created_ the garden. And when it had been used up, long before old age would have done her in, she’d just...died. But then, how were they still here?

“His heart stopped the night of the storm,” Neil said, and Andrew crouched down. Their eyes locked. Neil couldn’t lie or go mute, not anymore. Not if he, if any of them, wanted to live.  “He has to die.”

“No!” Dan said, shocked. “You want to keep us here, that’s why you won’t let us go. You can’t let him die!”

“That’s how we get out,” Andrew said. Neil confirmed.

“No, he…I know him. He _means_ something to me.” Dan insisted. But, there was nothing to be done.

The closer the old man—Wymack, Dan insisted they all call him—slid to death, the more convinced Neil became. His mother had used her life force to craft an imaginary dimension. She’d known she couldn’t sustain everyone, so she’d turned them to stone save for her son.

Neil remembered his mother chaining Wymack and wondered if that was the day she’d realized she wouldn’t last and created a failsafe. Now, his life force was waning, too. When Neil explained this, he’d expected Dan to be angry. Instead, she said, “It’s something he would have done. Regardless of whether your mother asked him to.”

The force behind the newfound benevolence revealed itself with time. Neil was no longer an enemy, and although that didn’t make him a friend, the others were beginning to remember the world beyond the garden with a certain apprehension. Kevin put voice to a shared thought one day: perhaps Mary had been protecting them.

Andrew’s twin, Aaron, avoided him, as did Allison and Renee. Nicky’s desire to teach Neil’s card games persisted, and was accompanied by a new openness. Card games were fun when the other person wasn’t guilting you.

Andrew remained silent company, and that was what Neil craved. All this noise, all these people in his home…Andrew’s quiet calm was necessary to Neil’s survival.

They sat together on the bench one day.

“We could have known each other,” Neil said, picking up an old conversation.

“We didn’t,” Andrew sounded so certain.

“Why not? We’re all connected somehow.”

“I’m here because of Kevin.”

“You don’t know anything for sure.”

Andrew said each word succinctly, “I forget nothing.”

Something in Andrew’s voice made Neil hesitate; many things about the garden would haunt Neil, but those words...

There _was_ something about Andrew. Something watchful, something observant. He’d woken up first, fought his way out of the stone stupor. Was that because he had more sense of self, an identity, to grab onto? Andrew had never expressed the same confusion as the others, just a burning desire to get out of the garden. Had Andrew had his memories the whole time?

Neil didn’t know what other conclusions to draw, although he was sure he was missing something.

The revelation was interrupted when Nicky shouted and sprinted through the greenery. A moment later, Neil spotted the cause of his excitement. An orange streak in the bushes: a fox.

One doesn’t hunt a fox, or even chase it. You run around wildly and hope you don’t look too stupid. Unless you were Andrew--then, you just watched. Aaron shouted, and they all converged on a bush that pushed against the iron poles of the fence.

Neil drew up short.

“A gate!” Nicky exclaimed.

Neil didn’t know when it had appeared, but somehow it didn’t surprise him that it was there. It made sense. Maybe this section of fence had always been a gate.

Drawn from her deathbed vigil, Dan knew what this meant. She cried until there was nothing left of the happy dancing girl. If they took Wymack with them, the entire garden could wink out of existence, and who knew if they could get out fast enough to avoid disappearing with it?

Matt had a noble character that Neil had not been witness to much of. But, it showed itself again today. He emerged from the shed with Wymack draped in his arms, and Dan almost burst into tears again.

“We talked about this,” Dan shook her head.

“We’ll go last,” Matt was resolute. “He’s family.”

“You can’t remember--” Nicky began to argue.

“They can,” Allison interrupted, lifting her chin, “I remembered Seth, they remember Wymack. Besides, are we really going to argue about this _now_? I want to get out of here.”

“He’s family,” Matt said again, this time as reassurance to Nicky.

“He’d do the same for us,” Dan added.

Neil faced his mother’s garden. It was a shell of what it used to be. The plants were withered and grey fog had risen to blot out the sky. This had been Neil’s home, and this was goodbye.

One by one, they stepped through the gate.

At first, all Neil saw was darkness. He wondered if he’d walked into a void—gotten lost and ended up in a place empty of anything. Then, someone shoved up against him and he smacked into cold, hard stone.

There was general tumult as they found each other repeatedly in the darkness. Neil felt along the cold stone walls. There were patterns, but he couldn’t make them out until  Nicky, yelling, kicked down a small door.

Light streamed in and it was a rush for the entryway.

Neil saw Renee kneel and kiss the Earth. He saw Nicky shake with revulsion when he realized they’d been in a Mausoleum. He saw Kevin stop and trace the family name “Moriyama” with near reverence. Matt cradled Dan who in turn cradled Wymack. Andrew stood apart from the group, his back to them all.

All of those things mattered, but they were overwritten by a grander truth.

Neil had spent his entire life inside a timeless, lonely paradise. There was no way forward. No way back. Just the same day, over and over, again and again and again. It had been beautiful, like his mother, but it had been stagnant.

In front of him sprawled the most wonderful, terrifying thing he could think of.

Neil saw a road.

 


End file.
